Hmmmm...
Trying desperately to remain within the realms of Philosophy and not
stray into the mysterious country that for me is Physics -
Unlike the piece of paper, time would appear to be an infinitely
divisible continuum. To imagine a scenario where there is a 'before'
and 'after' the opening of the package is too limiting and not only
are there a number of possible states involved in the arrival/
acquisition but it may well echo almost identical situations in the
past and future when other lenses arrived/will arrive. Thus it is
possible to induce and deduce - activities which require not only the
ability to remember but also an awareness of a future.
There was an unusual seer, Helenus of Troy, son of Priam, brother of
Cassandra who had the unusual ability to 'predict' the past - that is
to identify the actual events that led to the present rather than the
supposed ones and in accurate detail rather than mediated through the
mist of memory. A much admired skill. The past is as much a mystery
and as uncertain as the future in most senses. If presented with two
pieces of paper that appear to be cut from one, it is by no means
certain that they were - every piece of paper we handle was cut from
a larger one (even a 2.7 x 10m studio roll) but we do not normally
see it in those terms. Its past is concealed. Its future is probably
clearer to us. Our experience of time extends into the future as much
as into the past and sometimes more so as that is where we are going
at all times and as when we are driving, we tend to look forward with
far more care.
Time as a human artifact does not so much distinguish between types
of things but rather between the condition and position of things in
various phases. Not different things but the same things in different
positions. Time itself is not spacial but does define the spacial
position and condition of 'things'. Agreed, not a mere fourth spatial
dimension but not multi-dimensional either perhaps, being of a
different order. 'Dimension' implies spacial measurement.
My brane 'erts, both in the past that was my present, the present
that will be my past and the foreseeable future.
It's far too difficult an idea to leave to physicists.
Andrew Fildes
afildes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
On 12/11/2007, at 5:36 AM, John Morton wrote:
> Yet, I must disagree on the essential nature of time. As Bergson
> pointed out in his critique of Einstein's relativity, it is a
> philosophic mistake to consider time to be another dimension of
> space, to be measure on a scale and divided in to identical units.
> That is not how we experience time at all: that is how we
> experience the devices we construct to simulate and represent the
> passage of time.
>
> As Bergson so eloquently demonstrated in "Matter and Memory", our
> experience of time is dependent upon our ability to remember. So:
> if I divide a piece of paper into two pieces, the measure of each
> will add up to the previous total; that is a spatial division in
> kind. But if Moose receives his package in good order, I can
> compare a photo of him checking his mailbox the previous day, and
> finding nothing, to one taken at the moment when his hands lift his
> new piece of equipment out of the shipping container and into his
> sight for the first time. In this comparison, we see two completely
> different kinds of Moose; and were we to have a third photo of him
> intently focused upon employing his new piece of equipment for on
> an initial trial run, then nothing of this third photo would speak
> to us of what had been in the previous two. Even having the middle
> photo exclusively would not prepare us for the content of the other
> two: we might infer their existence but could not establish
> their content with the same degree of certainty that we found with
> the piece of paper we had cut into two pieces.
>
> I would even go so far as to say that, without time to
> distinguish between kinds of things, we would not be able to
> distinguish degrees of variance within these things. To my mind,
> then, the multi-dimensionality of time exceeds that of space and
> may very well encompass it (creating the illusion that time is a
> fourth spatial dimension).
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